I will be presenting a Silverlight 4 version of my Internationalizing Silverlight presentation twice in the coming months. The first is at the Silverlight User Group in London on Wednesday 15th September 2010 and the second is at the 34th Internationalization and Unicode Conference (where it is entitled "How To Achieve World(-Ready) Domination In Silverlight 4") in Santa Clara, California from Monday 18th October to Wednesday 20th October 2010. Typically I present internationalization subjects to developers and the consequence is that there is sometimes some groundwork that needs to be covered for the subject to make sense. Each of these upcoming events approaches this subject from a different viewpoint: the Silverlight User Group members know Silverlight very well and therefore will be solely focused on internationalization and the Internationalization and Unicode Conference attendees know internationalization very well and will be focused solely on Silverlight. I'm looking forward to the different perspectives. Here's the abstract:-

So you've written your Silverlight application and you want it to work in another language ? Then this session is for you. World-Readiness is all of the work that a developer needs to do to globalize an application and make it localizable (i.e. capable of being localized). Whereas these concepts are well established in Windows Forms and ASP.NET, Silverlight is not only a cut-down version of the .NET Framework but also cross platform and client-side. In this session you will learn how to localize Silverlight applications using .resx files, download culture-specific resources on demand so that users only download resources for the culture they need, understand what System.Globalization types and properties Silverlight does not support and why, what globalization and font support you can expect on Windows and the Mac, what the Silverlight installation user experience is for non-English users and what language support you can expect from the Silverlight framework.

When Windows 7 was first shown at PDC 2008 the feature that captivated me was the touch support. Truly this was a step towards multi-touch becoming mainstream and a significant step forwards in our industry. And now I get to share the joy that is multi-touch on Windows 7 using WPF in a presentation with the same name as this post's title. The first outing will be at VBUG Bristol on Wednesday 11th August 2010. The second outing will be at The Next Generation User Group in Cambridge on Tuesday 21st September 2010. Here's the abstract:-

Arguably the most innovative and forward thinking feature of Windows 7 is its multi-touch support. And it should be no surprise to see that WPF 4 boasts the same multi-touch support that utilizes this Windows 7 multi-touch support where available. In this session we will explore this new feature in WPF 4 and see what we get for free (i.e. without having to do any work), what you can get with only minimal additional work and what takes a bit more time and effort. Along the way we'll discover the basic touch support together with support for rotation, scaling and inertia as well as how to handle low level touch events using the raw API. Please note: the presentation shows true multi-touch - this is not a trick with two mice simulating multi-touch.

If you're around Bristol or Cambridge then come along and say hello.

I very rarely talk about personal stuff on this blog. Today is a very rare day.

Today my son's first book was published. He is 11. If I could be any more proud I would burst.

His book is "Invasion in the Quadrant of Doom" and it is the first book in the "Eric and the Defenders of the Universe" series.

When Sam was 9 he said he wanted to write a book. Kids say many things so there is always a balance between taking things with a pinch of salt and trying not to crush dreams. So we waited to see what would happen. Sure enough many nights he would sit at his computer and write more on his book and occasionally he would say he had written a new chapter. We would read it and be delighted that he was totally serious about writing a book. He finished the book in November 2009 (over a year later) and we felt the achievement warranted some recognition so we agreed to get it printed. The cover artwork is by Gary Young and 30 copies of the book were printed by Choir Press. The print run was solely intended for friends and family so you can't buy it anywhere and there is no ISBN number. And as the last page of the book says:-

The adventure continues in book 2 of Eric and the Defenders of the Universe "The Dead One Walks Again".

As a proud father I have to say it really doesn't get any better than this.

Saturday 5th June 2010 saw the second DDD South West and this time it was at UWE in Bristol. These events take a huge amount of organisation and there are many people to thank but the heroes of the day are surely our speakers. The sessions are proposed by anyone in the UK community and are voted for by the community. The result was an excellent variety of subjects delivered by a talented and inspiring set of speakers. The event feedback forms showed that the quality of speakers was one of the highlights of the event. I must admit that as I attend many events and run a user group I've noticed this quality many times and I really feel that this community is blessed with an unusually high level of speaking talent. Well done, guys, you are a credit to yourselves and our industry. And on the congratulations front we have to congratulate our top speakers, Gary Short for the second year running (Top Speaker For Presentation Skills) and Mark Rendle (Top Speaker For Knowledge Of Subject). You can see the top 3 speakers in both groups here. I was especially pleased with our New Speakers. We give priority to what we call 'new speakers' (people who have not spoken at a major event before) in order to ensure that our talent base grows. There were some really good scores from our newcomers and the feedback was equally impressive - well done, guys, a great result. One of last year's New Speakers made it into the top 3 speakers and it really shows that it is possible to break into this world.

There are a complete set of statistics on our Statistics page which make interesting reading particularly when compared with last year's statistics. One of the obvious ones is the number of attendees which was up by nearly 40% on last year. Unfortunately we cannot accurately say why the attendance is up because we made so many changes that could have influenced attendance:-

• It was the second year
• It was in Bristol instead of Taunton
• It was not on a Bank Holiday (we listened to last year's feedback)
• There was a public Call For Speakers
• There was public voting on sessions
• There were 6 tracks instead of 4
• Twitter is significantly more used in the community and we took advantage of this

The Alternative Track was back again this year. The Alternative Track is a set of sessions which do not follow the standard 'one presenter with a slide deck or set of demos and a projector' approach. Like last year the most attended session was the Balloon Debate. Two of last year's contenders (Eric Nelson and Gary Short) who featured on last year's video were back to battle it out again. Steve Sanderson gave the funniest and most original argument but like last year the voting of the audience is mercurial and Eric Nelson had to surrender last year's crown to the new King Of The Balloon Debate: Gary Short.

One of the new ideas we had this year was the "Getting Started In .NET" track. The goal behind this track is simple: to get people who are not in .NET into .NET. We had hoped that we would use existing .NET community members to advertise the track to colleagues who needed to get up to speed. Fortunately/unfortunately DDD South West 2 was full up (250 registrations) within 5 hours of registration going live (we had 100 registrations in the first 10 minutes). We released another 80 places after this but those were taken in the next 2 days. We reserved 50 places for UWE students but it became apparent that these would not all get taken so we released 25 new places 1 week before the event. The problem that this popularity gave us was that we didn't really have a chance to advertise this track to its intended audience before we were full up. Despite this we were pleased to see that it was reasonably attended and managed to reach an audience that would normally find most of the sessions at a typical DDD event too high level. Thanks to the training companies (WebTech, Rock Solid Knowledge and PC-Talk) who gave their time and their courses freely to make this track possible.

The event feedback forms were very useful to us and a number of themes stood out in the "What Did You Like Most About DDD South West 2 ?" and "What Did You Like Least About DDD South West 2 ?" questions:-

• Like Most: It's free, variety of subjects, top quality presenters, 6 tracks
• Like Least: Queue for cream teas, rooms too hot, lack of coffee in the morning

So let me take a moment to answer some of the "Like Least" answers. "Queue for cream teas" - yes, sorry, this didn't really work as well as we had hoped. We'll take the feedback and try to make this work as well as it did at DDD South West 1. "Rooms too hot" - this is a tough one. It was a hot day so the rooms were hot. We can't do much about the rooms themselves but we are considering holding the next one in a month when it isn't so hot. "Lack of coffee in the morning" - this one is about money. We originally wanted coffee on arrival and then again in the mid-morning break. We simply didn't have enough money. The bottles of water we provided were what our budget allowed. There are two points that arise from this. We budgeted for 300 people attending DDD South West 2 (the catering information has to be decided a fair bit in advance of the date). At the time we had 330 registrations with 15 people on the wait list and potentially 50 students attending. As such 300 seemed a reasonable number. Even on the day before there were 309 registrations plus an unknown number of students. What transpired was that 218 people attended giving us a drop out rate of 30%. The consequence was that we had many lunches and cream teas left over. It is interesting to note that the cost of these wasted lunches and cream teas would have paid for coffee in the morning. Next time a colleague signs up for a DDD event and simply doesn't turn up (or gives us less than 1 week's notice) you might like to mention the consequence of their actions to them. As an organiser of events I dream of a world where it is socially unacceptable to register for events and then not turn up (or withdraw so late that it makes no difference). The second point that arises from this is that there is clearly a demand for coffee in the morning (we provided it in the afternoon). So, if your company would like to make a big hit with attendees of DDD South West 3 next year why not sponsor "Coffee In The Morning" ? (Sorry, couldn't resist it).

Before I finish this post though there are some essential people to thank (beyond the fabulous speakers already mentioned):-

• Our hosts, UWE, who provided us with more rooms and equipment than is reasonable for any conference
• Our sponsors who made this event possible. DDD South West 2 is funded by our sponsors and this is absolutely black and white for us - without them there is no DDD South West. We are very grateful to them and to the sponsors who provided 60~ items of quality swag (software, training courses, books) for our attendees (that's not including the items of t-shirts, pens, mugs etc.). Out of interest that means that there were 218 attendees and 60 pieces of quality swag - that's a better than 25% chance of something very valuable.
• Our army of helpers. We had so many people helping us out on the day. Most of them were room monitors but some got lumbered with jobs that no one wants to do and everyone lumped in and helped us out and we can't thank you all enough for making it work.

Perhaps my favourite memory of DDD South West 2 though is an example of the nature of our community: all day long people kept coming up to me asking "Can I help ?". DDD events have a mantra "By The Community For The Community". These people truly epitomised the DDD mantra for me.

You can find pictures of DDD South West 2 here (by Jose Simas) and here (by Craig Murphy, DDD Founder And Grand Master).

See you at DDD South West 3 in 2011.

The DDD South West Team

• Martyn Fewtrell - Registration
• Chris Myhill - Location Manager
• Steve Sanderson - Speaker Dinner and Geek Dinner
• Ross Scott - Catering
• Jose Simas - Graphics and Printing
• Adam Towler - Alternative Track
• Guy Smith-Ferrier - Coordination

Another May means another DDD Scotland. Saturday 8th May 2010 saw the third incarnation of the exceptionally well organised DDD Scotland. Colin Mackay, Andy Gibson and the Scottish Developers team did yet another bang up job on the free one day conference in Glasgow. DDD Scotland had 345 registrations (including speakers, staff and the wait list) with places for 280 attendees and capacity for 200 attendees (a drop out of 80 attendees was expected to bring the 280 down to 200). The event (including Speakers/Organisers Dinner on the Friday night and Geek Dinner on the Saturday night) ran smoothly throughout and hundreds of developers went away happy as ever. Unusually for me I got to see a couple of sessions including the dynamic and lively George Adamson doing the jQuery session I missed at our own DDD South West last year and the always excellent Mike Taulty doing A Guided Tour Of Silverlight 4. My own contribution was a presentation on Enforcing Code 'Beauty' Using StyleCop and you can find the slides here.

And of course don't forget DDD South West 2 is on Saturday 5th June 2010 in Bristol.

We've got some great meetings coming up this Spring at The .NET Developer Network so I thought I'd let everyone know about them:-

• Thursday 25th March 2010 6:30pm (Doors open 6:00pm)
  "Hyper-V For Developers" with Liam Westley
  Liam Westley returns to Bristol fresh from his DDD8 exploits to give us a second dose of virtualization, this time focussing on Hyper-V.
• Monday 12th April 2010 6:30pm (Doors open 6:00pm)
  "Silverlight 4, MVVM and TDD" with Jesse Liberty
  Jesse Liberty (yes, that Jesse Liberty), Silverlight Geek from Microsoft US, starts his first UK and Ireland Silverlight tour in Bristol with a session on Silverlight 4, MVVM and TDD. Meet the man himself and see what this prolific guru has to say.
• Tuesday 11th May 2010 6:30pm (Doors open 6:00pm)
  "Leading-edge Web Development with ASP.NET MVC" with Steven Sanderson
  It's not often you have a published author right here in your home town. This month sees Steven Sanderson, author of the best selling MVC book talk about, well, ASP.NET MVC of course. Steve was rated the best speaker (by knowledge of subject) at DDD South West so this should be a great night.
• Wednesday 2nd June 2010 6:30pm (Doors open 6:00pm)
  "A Guided Tour of the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) in Silverlight 4" with Mike Taulty
  The fabulous Mike Taulty, Microsoft Developer Evangelist, introduces us to the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) in Silverlight 4. MEF is a powerful and valuable way to de-couple your applications from specific implementations. Mike is showing MEF in Silverlight 4 but the technology itself is valuable regardless of your choice of UI platform.

As usual membership is free, the meetings are free, everything is free and there'll be loads of swag. See you there.

Bristol now has its own chapter of the worldwide IT community group Girl Geek Dinners. The launch event was in February 2010 and their next event is on Thursday 25th March 2010 at UWE with guest speaker Ana Kronschnabl, CEO of FluffyLogic (it's actually the same date and the same venue as the next DotNetDevNet meeting but GGD are in S block and DotNetDevNet are in Q block). Men are welcome but the rule is you have to be invited by a Girl Geek.

Following on the success of DDD South West 1 last year we can announce that the imaginatively titled DDD South West 2 (Twitter tag #dddsw) will be held on Saturday 5th June 2010 at UWE in Bristol. The format will be similar to last year except that this time the Call For Speakers is open to everyone - not just new speakers. Here's the full list of dates:-

• Call For Speakers opens: Tuesday 2nd March 2010
• Call For Speakers closes: Monday 22nd March 2010
• Voting Opens: Monday 29th March 2010
• Voting Closes: Friday 9th April 2010
• Registration Opens: Tuesday 20th April 2010
• DDD South West 2: Saturday 5th June 2010

Jesse Liberty, Silverlight Geek (Microsoft US Developer Evangelist for Silverlight), is doing a tour of the UK and Ireland in April to coincide with Microsoft UK's week of TechDays (#techdays) events. Jesse is speaking at Bristol, London, Cambridge, Leeds, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Belfast and Dublin between Monday 12th April 2010 and Friday 23rd April 2010. You can match the dates to the venues at Jesse's post. Jesse's first stop on the tour is at The .NET Developer Network on Monday 12th April 2010 where we will also be celebrating our third birthday (with cake!). Jesse will be presenting:-

• Silverlight 4, MVVM and TDD: A Brave New World (level 300)
  1.       MVVM and Silverlight to build test-driven programs
  2.       Understanding Refactoring and Dependency Injection
  3.       A Walk through of a non-trivial application

Another DDD and another major success. Saturday saw the eighth in the ever popular DDD event at TVP in Reading. This one broke new records that must be getting increasingly difficult to break. DDD 7 in November 2009 'sold' out in 4 hours. DDD 8 'sold' out in 12 minutes and 47 seconds (that's 320 places). The wait list of 200 filled up later that day. It is difficult to tell whether this actually means an increased demand (although I suspect it does) because for DDD 7 the organisers upheld the tradition of not telling anyone what day and what time registration would open but for DDD 8 the date and time was well known in advance. The Twitter tag #ddd8 was also the third most used tag on Twitter on Saturday 30th January 2010. And even better we got to say goodbye to Barry Dorrans (off to Redmond to work on WPL etc.).

I played my small part with another showing of "Automating Testing Using Windows Virtual PC" (slides, source code) which I thoroughly enjoyed as usual and went well despite Windows Updates.